We're thrilled today to announce industry-first research we've conducted with Placed, the leader in location driven insights and ad-to-store attribution, that shows how major nationwide brands are using native ads to drive more in-store visits and at greater cost efficiency than traditional digital advertising tactics.

Placed is an official research partner of ours, and moving forward all Sharethrough clients will be able to run studies looking at how likely people are to visit a brand’s store after seeing a native ad on our platform and benchmark that information against industry norms.

As we keep drilling down on the ‘why’ of native at Sharethrough, ROI and brand lift studies need to show brands how their native investment is moving the needle for their business. This new work we’re doing with Placed locks in a major new piece of this narrative, proving that there is a direct line between better ads in someone’s content feed today, and more people shopping in that brand’s store tomorrow.

To prove out the potential of native and this new research product, in late-2016, Sharethrough and Placed looked at national campaigns run through the Sharethrough Exchange for a popular quick service restaurant chain, a nationwide apparel brand and a major global consumer electronics company.

All three brand results clearly established native advertising’s effectiveness in driving traffic to retail stores and at a significantly lower cost-per-visit than display ads.

● Native ads drive significant lifts in in-store traffic:

Across the three brands studied, people exposed to native ads were 21 percent more likely on average to visit a brand’s physical retail location than those who weren’t. All brands studied beat Placed benchmarks for in-store lift for their respective verticals, with an average lift above benchmarks of 300 percent.

The brands Sharethrough and Placed studied drove traffic to their stores through native ads at an effective cost of 41 cents per visit. The major consumer electronics brand drove in-store traffic to stores selling their products at 22 cents a visit, a high cost-efficiency that was 84 percent lower than Placed’s benchmark.

● The real life business impact from native ads reflected a significant return on investment:

The quick service restaurant chain examined was able to drive extra sales from people exposed to their native ad campaign equivalent to a 20x return on their native spend.

Placed is the common currency for buyers and sellers of media to measure the effectiveness of advertising in driving store visits, and the only solution in-market truly independent of media, With the world’s largest opt-in location audience, Placed analyzes billions of 1st party locations on a daily basis, observing real-world context and the complete path of consumer activity.

“Across multiple verticals, Sharethrough’s native advertising has been proven to drive significant incremental lift in people seeking out their products in stores,” said David Shim, Founder and CEO of Placed. “This native approach - with less audience interruption - has consistently delivered outsized results, and has proven itself as a must-have in any buy where offline results are a key metric.”